Pacific Gas and Electric Company: Smart Grid Annual Report- 2012

Author:

Pacific Gas and Electric Company

Year:

2012

Abstract:

As one of the earliest and largest adopters of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in North America—with more than nine million electric and gas SmartMeters™ deployed across its 70,000-square-mile service area—Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is now leveraging this technology platform prudently and methodically to build the next-generation Smart Grid to meet the needs of our electric customers in the 21st century.
In its June 2011 Smart Grid Deployment Plan, PG&E stated that its vision for the Smart Grid was “to provide customers safe, reliable, secure, cost-effective, sustainable and flexible energy services through the integration of advanced communications and control technologies to transform the operations of our electric network, from generation to the customer’s premise.” PG&E customers will see many benefits from the Smart Grid in the coming years. Some of these benefits include, the ability to lower energy bills by controlling energy use, the availability of pricing signals which will help customers save money by shifting their energy use to times of the day when energy prices are lower, and increased reliability of service, including faster outage detection and restoration, as well as greater convenience from faster response to service requests.